hastily
turned, and then as further developments appeared, the blue eyes showed
a look of puzzled wonder, quickly followed by horror and despair.

Peter closed the book and laid it aside, and finished his luncheon in a
daze.

One thing stood forth in his mind. He must take time to think--think
deeply, carefully, before he did anything. He must get away by himself
and meet this strange, new emergency that had come to him.

What to do, how to conduct himself, these were questions of gravest
import, and not to be lightly settled.

He thought quickly, and concluded that for a secure hiding-place a man
could do no better than choose a big city hotel.

Finishing his meal he went to the desk and asked for a room, registering
as John Harrison, which was the name by which he had been known on the
ship that had brought him to port.

Once behind the locked door of his room he threw himself into an
armchair and devoured the book he had bought.

Rapidly he flew through it; then went over it again, more slowly, until
Peter Boots was familiar with every chapter of the book that his father
had written in his memory.

Memory! And he wasn't dead!

The book, he saw, had gone through a large number of editions,
wherefore, many people had read the tale of his tragic fate in the
Labrador wild, and of his recrudescence and communications with his
parents, and now, here he was reading it himself.

It is not easy to realize how strange it must seem to read not only
one's own death notices but the accounts of one's return to earth in
spirit form, and to be informed of the astonishing things one said and
did through the kind offices of a professional medium!

A medium! Madame Parlato! And she "got in touch" with him! She succeeded
in getting messages from him--and materializations!

Peter's chicory blue eyes nearly popped out of his head when he read of
the "materialization" of his tobacco pouch.

"Jolly glad I know where it is," he thought; "I've missed the thing, but
how did it waft itself to a professional medium! Bah! the stuff makes
me sick!

"But Dad wrote it! Dad--my father! And mother's in the game! Got to read
the book all over again."

And again he delved into the volume, seeming unable to take in the
appalling fact of what had been done.

"They believe it!" he said at last, reaching the final page for the
third time; "they believe it from the bottom of their blessed souls!

"Who is that medium person? Where'd she